Portuguese Discovery
This brings us down to the rise of Portuguese nautical endeavor, which seems to have begun earlier than has generally been supposed but became most conspicuous under the direction of Prince Henry the Navigator. Its achievements included the rediscovery of Madeira and the Azores, which in many quarters had been forgotten, the exploration of the African coast, the accidental discovery or rediscovery of South American Brazil by Cabral, and the voyage of Vasco da Gama to India around the Cape of Good Hope. Perhaps we might insert in the list the discovery of Antillia. At any rate, it got on the map with a Portuguese name in the first half of the fifteenth century, and several other islands accompanied it. They all certainly seem to be American and West Indian.
Columbus, Vespucius, and Cabot
Incidentally the Portuguese activity stimulated the enthusiasm of Columbus, guided his plans, and contributed to the eminent success of his great undertaking. In Antillia it provided a first goal, which he believed to be nearer than it really was. He fully meant to attain it and probably really did so, but without recognizing Antillia in Cuba or Hispaniola, for he thought he had missed it on the way and left it far behind. Vignaud insists that Columbus did not aim at Asia until after he actually reached the West Indies but sought to attain Antillia only.[11] However this may be, there is no doubt that he found in the island a notable prompting to his supreme adventure.
The discoveries of Columbus, Vespucius, and Cabot, with their immediate followers, heralded the opening of an effective knowledge of the western world and the ocean world to the centers of civilization. Thereafter the delineation of new islands did not cease but for a long time rather multiplied; yet they had little significance or importance, being chiefly the products of fancy, optical illusion, or error in reckoning. One of the latest worth considering is the island of Buss (Ch. XII), reported where there is no land by a separated vessel of Frobisher’s expedition near the end of the sixteenth century. Afterward it was known as the Sunken Land of Bus, or Buss, to the grave concern of mariners.
We are reasonably secure against such imposition now, though perhaps it is not yet impossible. The old mythical or apocryphal islands, too, are gone from standard maps and most others, though you may yet find in cartographic work of little authority one or two of the more tenacious specimens making a final stand.
CHAPTER II
ATLANTIS
About 2,300 years ago Plato wrote of a great and populous island empire in the outer (Atlantic) ocean, which had warred against Athens more than 9,000 years before his time and been suddenly engulfed by a natural cataclysm. According to his statement of the case this prodigious phenomenon, with all the splendor of national achievement that shortly preceded it, had been quite forgotten by the Athenians; but the tradition was recorded in the sacred books of the priests of Sais at the head of the Nile delta and was related by these Egyptians to Solon of Athens when he visited them apparently somewhere near 550 B. C. Solon embodied it, or began to embody it, in a poem (all trace of which is lost) and also related it to Dropides, his friend. It is probably to be understood that he further communicated it to this friend in some written form, for we find Critias in a dialogue with Socrates represented by Plato as declaring: “My great-grandfather, Dropides, had the original writing, which is still in my possession.”[12] If so, it has vanished.